Letter to Helen Keller from Mark Twain

Riverdale - on - the Hudson
St. Patrick's Day, 1903

Dear Helen:

I must steal half a moment from my work to say how glad I am to have your book
and how highly I value it, both for its own sake and as a remembrance of an
affectionate friendship which has subsisted between us for nine years without a
break and without a single act of violence that I can call to mind. I suppose
there is nothing like it in heaven; and not likely to be, until we get there and
show off. I often think of it with longing, and how they'll say, "there they
come--sit down in front." I am practicing with a tin halo. You do the same. I
was at Henry Roger's last night, and of course we talked of you. He is not at
all well--you will not like to hear that; but like you and me, he is just as
lovely as ever.

I am charmed with your book--enchanted. You are a wonderful creature, the most
wonderful in the world--you and your other half together--Miss Sullivan, I mean,
for it took the pair of you to make complete and perfect whole. How she stands
out in her letters! her brilliancy, penetration, originality, wisdom, character,
and the fine literary competencies of her pen--they are all there.

Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that
"plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance,
oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul--let us go farther and
say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human
utterances in plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second hand,
consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources and daily use
by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he
originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them any where
except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and
his temperament, which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

When a great
orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten thousand men--but we call
it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not
enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some
degree, and we call it his but there were others that contributed. It takes a
thousand men to invent a telegraph or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a
telephone, or any other important thing--and the last man gets the credit and we
forget the others. He added his little mite--that ninety-nine parts of all
things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the
lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

Then why don't we unwittingly reproduce the phrasing of a story, as well as the
story itself? It can hardly happen--to the extent of fifty words--except in the
case of a child; its memory tablet is not lumbered with impressions, and the
natural language can have graving room there and preserve the language a year or
two, but a grown person's memory tablet is a palimpsest, with hardly a bare
space upon which to engrave a phrase. It must be a very rare thing that a whole
page gets so sharply printed on a man's mind, by a single reading, that it will
stay long enough to turn up some time or other to be mistaken by him for his
own.

No doubt we are constantly littering our literature with disconnected
sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and how imagined to be
our own, but that is about the most we can do. In 1866 I read Dr. Holmes's
poems, in the Sandwich Islands. A year and a half later I stole his dedication,
without knowing it, and used it to dedicate my "Innocents Abroad" with. Ten
years afterward I was talking with Dr. Holmes about it. He was not an ignorant
ass--no, not he; he was not a collection of decayed human turnips, like your
"Plagiarism Court," and so when I said, "I know now where I stole it, but who
did you steal it from," he said, "I don't remember; I only know I stole it from
somebody, because I have never originated anything altogether myself, nor met
anyone who had!"

To think of those solemn donkeys breaking a little child's heart with their
ignorant rubbish about plagiarism! I couldn't sleep for blaspheming about it
last night. Why, their whole histories, their whole lives, all their learning,
all their thoughts, all their opinions were one solid rock of plagiarism, and
they didn't know it and never suspected it. A gang of dull and hoary pirates
piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that
they think they've caught filching a chop! Oh, dam--